British Supreme Court Blocks $4.3 Billion Class Action Against Google

The UK’s Supreme Court has blocked a planned £3.2 billion ($4.3 billion) British class action suit against Google over allegations that the company illegally tracked the personal information of millions of iPhone users.

The UK’s top judges on Wednesday unanimously accepted a Google appeal against the country’s first data privacy case.

The historic case led by Richard Lloyd, a consumer rights activist and former director of Which? magazine, sought to extend the UK class action regime to include damage claims for alleged misuse of data – even if there is no loss or obvious financial danger.

Lloyd claimed that Google secretly appropriated more than 5 million personal data from Apple smartphone users between 2011 and 2012, bypassing default privacy settings in Safari browsers to track internet browsing histories, and used this for commercial purposes .

“We are bitterly disappointed that the Supreme Court has not done enough to protect the public from Google and other Big Tech firms that break the law,” he said.

His lawyer, James Oldnall of the Milberg law firm, said it was a “dark day when corporate greed is more important than our right to privacy.”

Google said it had focused for years on products and infrastructure that respect and protect people’s privacy, and that the complaint related to events that took place a decade ago and were dealt with at the time.

“The Supreme Court has recognized that ‘loss of control’ over an individual’s personal data is not, in and of itself, sufficient to support a class action suit for damages,” said Kate Scott, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance.